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The Contradiction Of Google And Facebook (Mediapost 9.28.11) 0

For the last three years I’ve listened to the debate about whether Facebook will be around, much less dominant in 10 years, and if you asked me the question last month my answer would have been yes.  However, if you asked me that question anytime this past week my response has changed.  Dramatically.

Facebook is simply making too many mistakes.  They seem to have attended the same professional schooling that birthed the CEO of Netflix, or Qwikster, or whatever they call themselves this week.  Facebook changes its privacy policy like I change Pearl Jam t-shirts on a weekend.  They futz with the interface of my news feed, adding triangles and squares and call-outs.  They change the parameters of who’s posts will show up in my news feed at a whim and without my consent, forcing me to uncover cleverly hidden ways to return the feed to its original appearance.  They cease sending me updates as to when people post on my page, and I miss information that I would have otherwise benefitted from.  In sum, they attack my habits as well as invade my privacy in a way that doesn’t foster much loyalty or allegiance.

Google has been the exact opposite.  They don’t change the interface; it’s a search box (it took 10 years for me to be able to put a picture on that page).  They add features in “beta” and test them for years before they roll them out to everyone.  Search results may be updated on a regular basis with slight tweaks to the algorithm, but in such subtle ways that they truly offer refined value to the consumer without causing mass hysteria.  When Google does do something big, they tell you about it and offer you the chance to prepare and ease into it.  When Facebook makes a change, its summarily adopted overnight and that’s that.  You have no say in the matter.

What’s truly most disturbing, and what cannot be forgiven (most of the issues above are basically changes in design and can be forgiven) is that Facebook messes with privacy and Google rarely does.  Facebook’s means of generating revenue is by guessing who I am and what I like based on what I post.  It’s implied targeting.  Google’s means of generating revenue comes from stated requests for information.  That’s search targeting.  Google does have a behavioral, privacy-threatening component in some of their mail ads, but for the most part they’re still based on keywords and not by scraping personal data.  It’s still fundamentally targeting by content rather than audience.  Google’s hat is hung squarely on the hook of search, whereas Facebook’s hat is hanging by a thread to the hook of privacy and inter-personal communications.

Another contradiction between Google and Facebook is that Google came out almost as an altruistic effort to organize the world’s information (and, of course, “do no evil”).  They gave away search functionality to sites, they gave away search to users, and they fostered an image of usefulness and respect by their peers.  From day one, with Zuckerberg’s attitude and approach, Facebook came off as antagonistic, selfish, and only in it for the money.  When they released Facebook connect to the world, attempting to expand the social graph and make it easier for the world to share information, they did so by stating this would give them more access to more information.  It came off positive at first, but companies understand there was never an altruistic idea behind that move.

Maybe it’s simply my perception, but for the first five years of Google’s life, they did everything right.  They came off altruistic, mutually beneficial, and simple.  From inception, Facebook has come off as greedy, immature, and only in it for themselves.  Google’s pledge was to the consumer, whereas Facebook’s pledge was for its shareholders.  I understand that this is a business, but if you look at how Google did it and where they are now, it’s hard to argue success.  In the tangible world it’s the difference between Apple and Microsoft.  Google and Apple feel like brothers of another mother whereas Facebook and Microsoft feel like a match-made-in-heaven.  

So if you ask me where things will be in 5-10 years, I have to think predict that Facebook will lose some of its luster and position in the marketplace.  It’s not to say that someone else will come along and replace them as the giant of the social web.  It’s more to say that something will come along and change the way we view the social web, and Facebook might get left in the dust.

Or maybe I’m wrong.   What do you think?

 

Posted on: 09-30-2011
Posted in: treffiletti.com

Selling Inside and Six F-Words 0

I had the good fortune this week to co-lead a discussion at the new Digital World Expo in Las Vegas with Lynn Ingham and John Durham. I was grateful for the opportunity because selling things up the ladder internally is something I really used to suck at, but thanks in part to lessons I learned from my co-presenters over the years, I got much better at it.

As is my wont, I got better with a little list of things to remember as I prepared my pitch. I thought I’d share my little list in the chance that it may help someone else improve their win rate for internal selling.

Fit: Naturally any digital solution needs to fit the brand challenges facing the company. But the better you know the immediate issues facing the brand — and the language the brand uses — the more likely you can point out the features of your recommendation that make it an ideal fit for. We complain about internal company silos all the time, but our own success as digital advocates requires that we destroy silos instead of complaining about them. By improving the flow of information we can be of greater service to our brands.

Fear: Our insular way of talking about the industry and the digital divide that separates us from “regular people” – in our companies and in our target audiences – creates discomfiture among final decision makers. When we make an effort to explain things clearly and give decision makers a chance to, for example, try new platforms, we make those around us feel smart. The security of feeling smart helps people feel good about saying yes.

Faith: We need the trust and confidence of others to succeed. There’s a certain “type” of person in our industry that tries so hard to be different than others in organizations. In my experience these people are the least effective at internal selling because in their zeal to appear different they become disconnected from the people and the business. And if people don’t trust you – don’t think you have their backs – they won’t have yours.

Fog: While keeping up with everything in digital is hard, that is often not the responsibility of the final decision maker. That’s YOUR responsibility, as is distilling the oceans of new platforms, ideas, and hype that wash up on shore into coherent strategies and programs. Digital people find this stuff fascinating. Lots of other people don’t. When we can demonstrate the value of things with clarity, and without burying those around us with extraneous information, we clear the fog that makes it harder for people to say yes.

Follow through: In an era of extreme accountability, you need to make the most of every opportunity that reaches you. Match the risk profile of your recommendations with the stage that your company is in the progression toward adopting digital as a central part of its business. And make damned sure that when you get an OK on a project you do everything in your power to make that program successful. Success opens the floodgates of budget and responsibility. Failure slams them shut. There is a lot of discussion in the industry about the need to fail to stay out front of developments. I embrace the spirit of that, but before you fail, make sure you bank some cred with some successes. Usually, the first things a brand should do in digital are not fraught with risk. The risk is in not doing them.

Fun: People get into marketing because it is more interesting than they think finance or accounting or operations would be. Launching a great new product or launching a great marketing campaign is supposed to be thrilling. In digital, we get so buried in our ability to present millions of “metrics” that we forget the emotional side of what we do. Digital efforts are inherently exciting because their capabilities are unprecedented. Help decision makers feel the thrill. Show them how social motivates real people to express their love for the brand. Demonstrate how dynamic video is so compelling. Use the feedback loop of digital to enrich the empathy that is such a central part of marketing.

For me, remembering those six “f-words” as I formulate a pitch makes it far easier to put a tick in the win column. The help people feel smart, empowered and excited about digital. When you pair those emotional wins with a compelling argument for the rational side of your proposal, you’re unstoppable!

Posted on: 09-29-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Tech companies and “the service problem” 0

Over the past few weeks I have had occasion to talk with a
number of digital leaders who lamented the experience of working with tech
start-ups. I want to start by saying that these critics are not people who
don’t appreciate innovation – to the person, they love it – but at the same
time they find it difficult or off-putting to deal with the companies that are
driving the change in the industry.
Versus
our experience with the media companies we deal with on a more regular basis,
service from tech firms generally doesn’t stack up. Our core complaint is that
the tech company is there when an IO needs to be processed, but impossible to
reach when you want to talk about business issues or address issues in a
program that is running.
While
sales people tend to be thinner on the ground for tech firms than media
companies, that doesn’t excuse bad service. The ironic thing is that while
media companies are desperate to hear more about business issues – to be
treated as partners – tech companies tend not to be. Not always, but
frequently.
So
why aren’t tech firms as responsive? First, I think we need to recognize that
the tech world values TECH, not service. VCs are primarily concerned with the
quality of the tech team, thinking that for the right product other disciplines
can be backfilled in. Not an excuse, but a fact just the same.
Second,
most consumer facing tech solutions were devised to meet consumer needs, not
advertiser needs. We all know that most media-rooted properties – magazines for
instance – exist because advertisers want access to an audience AND consumers
want information. So media companies tend to be more flexible about providing
more and more intrusive ways to reach out to readers. Contrast that with a service
like Twitter. I will wager that virtually no attention was paid to advertiser
needs when that product was first conceived. The result is a service that is
highly appealing for consumers but harder for brands to get their heads around.
Third,
media company models and service structures were conceived in an era of
information scarcity – where producing, say, the best shelter magazine meant
consumers got exponentially more “with you” than “without you.” Scarcity meant
more revenue, and that they could afford to pay for more service providers. By
contrast, au courant tech companies are developed in an era of consumer control
– where that shelter content competes with thousands or tens of thousands of other
“fish in the sea,” and the vast majority of those “fish” offer up their content
for free. It is only natural, then, that those companies place more emphasis on
ensuring that they deliver what consumers want rather than what advertisers
want.
Fourth,
great service for advertisers tends to focus on qualitative factors, custom
offerings, and high touch experiences. Those are not the core strengths of tech
companies. I think of it like this. That tech CEO is trying to change the
world, not change the way I feel about anti-perspirant stains on fabric. Not an
excuse for bad service, but something to consider as we ponder what we can
realistically expect to get from them in terms of service.
Finally,
they really haven’t had to care about us until recently. Put yourself in their
shoes for a sec. If your sole source of revenue is a VC, and the VC vales tech
leadership over everything else, what incentive would you have to build out a
partner services org? But as those VCs shift to wanting tech companies to start
generating revenue more quickly, the companies themselves need to find ways of
satisfying the very people that make that possible. In addition to their
consumer users.
In
a market driven economy, money talks, and if a tech company wants $500K of your
budget, you have the right to expect them to treat you right, answer your calls
and messages, listen to your needs and go back and see if they can address
them. If they don’t do those things, they shouldn’t get your money.  
There
is no excuse for bad service. But it might be useful to give a well meaning
team the benefit of the doubt if they really are in the process of changing the
world. In many cases, these teams are filled with people who must make up their
service strategies as they go along, and it is possible that you could forge a
great relationship with a great company in the process of helping them better
help you.
But
marketers absolutely have the right to expect service to improve over time. In
my view, dealing with a few growing pains along the way is acceptable if the
tech company really is transformational in nature. But persistent crappy
service isn’t acceptable. And even the largest transformational tech companies
need to remember that just as consumers have thousands of choices online, so
too do marketers.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Wingsplay Rewards Influentials for Distributing Your Vids 0

Viral distribution has always been one of the Holy Grails of digital. The idea of people seeking out your marketing messages and then distributing them for you – at no cost – has activated the salivary glands of many a brand leader.
But for most brands, it shares another characteristic with the Holy Grail: elusiveness. Many brands have tried to create “viral” programs, and very few have succeeded.
Part of it is our own fault. We fail to recognize that our ham fisted marketing messages aren’t the sorts of things that people care about or want to share. But there’s another thing. Some brands jump the hurdle of relevance and make content that people would share if they knew about it. But those same brands often fail because the would be spreaders never see their content.
Enter . What this company does is offer a platform through which you can work with influential people in social media to distribute your videos on a cost per view basis. Instead of paying a publisher to drive plays, you reward influential voices online through Wingsplay.
So let’s start with the first question on your minds. Is it “OK” to reward people to distribute messages in social media? A couple of years ago there were some shady businesses driving blog posts about brands without disclosing the compensation they were providing. This ain’t like that. Rather, I’d liken it to paying a celeb to drink your Pepsi or use your basketball shoes.
Says Wingsplay Founder Olivier Lasry,
As celebrities are paid to lend their name and image to campaigns, Wingsplay rewards influential social media users to share the most entertaining viral ads. But this democratization of endorsement goes way further: contrary to working with big celebrities, influential social media users have strong ties to their social connections and 2-way conversations with these friends, fans and followers. They consequently generate much more engagement and visibility,
Online content is more likely to be played and interacted with when it has been posted by a friend versus a celebrity simply because the former values their comments and interactions much more than the latter.
Wingsplay also ensures that every post made as a result of the platform transparently communicates its sponsored nature. That ensures you live up to the letter – and the spirit – of the FTC regulations.
Not just anybody is flogging your videos. It’s not like that at all. Rather, you choose your target audience, and then set a CPV for the program. Then, those that LIKE YOUR CONTENT and are interested in your program distribute your video to people with a high degree of likelihood to be in your target audience. They are then compensated based upon the plays they drive. Obviously, programs that offer a higher bounty are going to attract more influencer attention, but in my view most of these influencers will ultimately select content they like best. But a healthy CPV wouldn’t hoit!
I like this approach. I am a huge believer in the need to seed video distribution. While we may think or hope that millions of people are constantly scanning the web looking for messages, the reality is that there is so much content out there that even the best stuff sometimes dies on the vine. I constantly find good content online that never really went anywhere because you had to really be digging around to find it. And most people aren’t spending time online doing that.
With a service like Wingsplay, you get passed the initial awareness problem so that your ideas are seen by thousands – maybe even millions. Additionally, you get to target the sorts of people who you want to expose to your video. Where it goes from there, of course, is up to the quality of the creative idea and the content itself.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Doat remakes the mobile search experience 0

Most people agree that the most useful and pleasant mobile experiences occur in apps, not on  mobile-appropriate web pages. Apps have been the key to iPhone’s ascendance on domination in smart phones, and they have also propelled Android ahead of venerable competitors like Blackberry and Nokia’s Symbian. More apps means more market share, broadly speaking. Few or no apps = death in today’s smart phone environment.
But Mobile Search was singularly focused on finding the best content on web pages. At least it was until now.
 is an Israel- and San Francisco-based start-up focused on transforming mobile search by querying and providing results from apps rather than the web. When you search for a term in Do@, what you get in response is a sort of visual menu of app screen shots housing content appropriate to your request.
So what does that mean?
 If you want information or the trailer on Hangover 2, an ordinary mobile search result might refer you to the web site, which may or may not have a mobile version. With Doat, you get screen shots of the IMDB , Flixster, and other theatrically oriented apps. Tapping a particular result takes you to a version of the app delivered in HTML 5, essentially a web page but with the appearance and functionality of an app. This “page” simulates the functionality of the fully functioning app, and enables you to experience all of its benefits.
Here’s the vid:

Because app viewing experiences are designed for the small screen, there is a high degree of likelihood that your overall experience as well as info access will be better through an app. Additionally, because the user does not actually have to download the app before they review the content, Doat actually offers a powerful trial mechanism for app developers anxious to get more users, and for users to try before they buy
Because so much mobile search has a local component, Doat takes your location into consideration when you make your query. So, for instance, if you are looking for a restaurant recommendation nearby, the app will connect you to location-focused results in the Yelp app and the like.
I think this is a big deal for digital and for brands. For digital, it is, perhaps, a really positive harbinger of  a broader revolution in mobile user experience. I believe the figures are that mobile web access will surpass PC web access in about 2013 in the US – it already has in several Asian countries. But in order for Mobile Internet to deliver on its promise, basic connected utilities need to evolve experientially to be OPTIMIZED for the handset. Since Search is arguably the most ubiquitous such utility, Doat is an important step in the mobile transformation of the web.
From a marketing standpoint, the app-centric nature of Doat may be a reason for many marketers to rethink their mobile advertising and marketing strategies, opting for a greater presence in the world of apps. While it is too soon to tell how much app usage will come from Doat or its future imitators, it is plain that we’ll need to take a serious look at those figures as they materialize.
Doat has made its debut as an iPhone app, and is available for free in the App Store.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Media6Degrees Drives Strong Results By Applying an “Act-Alike” Social Science Principle to Targeting 0

I gravitate to companies that take a different approach or direction in digital media.
Because there are now so many companies doing more or less the same things with the same data points and the same units, many of us are skeptical about competing claims in the same industry categories. Raise your hand if you find the claims of reach, quality, and transparency a little tiresome when spouted by ad networks. Nuff said.
So I like different, and because of that I have liked  from the first time I heard about them. Media6Degrees was founded upon the social science principle that people with similar interests tend to cluster into groups that share brand affinities and purchase patterns. They use a four stage process to deliver results.
  1. Identify:  The company begins an engagement with a client by cookie-ing visitors to client web sites, taking one or two weeks to collect enough data points to build a seed population for a campaign.
  2. Match: They identify the clustering behavior of your site visitors on the web, and match potential prospects (usually in the tens of millions of people) to deliver scale.
  3. Execute:  They deliver media to those matches through exchange based buying:.
  4. Refine: They adjust the model based upon new learnings and refinement
So imagine you visit a brand web site and then go on your merry way, doing the things you like to do online. Like visiting blogs about quarter horses, sending e-greetings, checking the A’s scores, lurking in eBay auctions for beanie babies, taking a ten-minute break looking at paparazzi photos of celeb cellulite, flipping over to Facebook to leave a status update about how busy and overworked you are, and so on.
Your set of activities is compared to those of tens of millions of others. Individuals that demonstrate similar web consumption patterns are identified as having a high degree of likelihood of having similar interests. People who behave like you start seeing banners and videos for the product. And over time, the set of people seeing the banners and videos is refined to drive better metrics and scale.
Media6Degrees isn’t collecting user interest data, or leveraging 3rd party interest data. They actually DON’T CARE that you like cellulite photos and quarter horses. As with all reputable networks, individual identities are anonymized. But Media6Degrees offers two additional layers of anonymity – they don’t try to record your interests or bucket the types of content you visit.
You aren’t classified into some sort of “horses and corsets” psychographic to them. They don’t even focus on your demographics. What a person is – is someone with similar interests as certain other people, ergo more likely to have interest in the brands that those other people buy.
In this way Media6Degrees identifies the “Social Signature” of a brand. Then they purchase media against others who demonstrate similar interests, constantly tightening and refining the algorithm to improve the match.
That refining and winnowing is important because Media6Degrees optimizes to a desired metric, not just site visitation. They often find that while site visitors have one behavior pattern, actual buyers have somewhat different patterns.
A new offering called Planner can also provide brands and pubs information on the best sites to find brand users, and the best brands through which to monetize site users. 
Anyway. By constantly tightening these Social Signature parameters they drive better and better results.
How much better? Well, I will only speak for the half dozen or so campaigns that I have knowledge of – ones that we fielded at Catalyst S+F. In every single case Media6Degrees was the number one or number two performer on the plans. By wide margins. We’ve seen results more than 3X better than any other plan element on several occasions.
And what I like best is that they drive those mega results by breaking the rules. While the rest of the world is getting more and more interest data from third parties, Media6Degrees says they don’t give a stuff about your interests, only a sense of how what you do on line is similar to what other individuals do. I am not condemning interest based targeting by saying this. Just pointing out that there may be more than one route to Zanzibar.
Me, I like having another path to take.
I like rule breakers. The crowd zigs. Media6Degrees zags. And based upon the results we have seen…zagging = good.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Scayl Delivers “HDemail” That Enables Attachments of Unlimited Size 0

Today’s post is to tell you about a new service that you may find rather useful in your own professional and personal lives.
 is a start-up out to “fix” email by eliminating many of the restrictions that impede it from being a great sharing platform for larger files.
While sending and receiving large files has long been a nuisance, the problems are only getting worse as richer and more high def content enters our daily lives. 10 years ago, a couple of megs was enough to activate firewalls in many companies. While most companies have raised their file size limits significantly since then, the reality is that the size of the sort of content files we might like to share are rising faster than the capacity of most email servers and platforms to process them.
This is particularly true given the ascendancy of video as a critical means of business and personal communication.
The Scayl system eliminates many of these issues by allowing a file to be downloaded from multiple sources and on a background, streaming basis. So if you want to send that home vid of baby’s first steps or that vid of your presentation from the last sales meeting, the recipient receives the file from any Scayl enabled computer that already has it. The more people who have the file, the faster it will be shared to the recipient. It’s a concept that you are familiar with if your ever did P2P file sharing.
Additionally, users can start viewing content like a video before the download is complete.
But there’s a lot more to this service than just that. Scayl also offers superior authentication and security layers that help reduce the threats of phishing and other sorts of attacks. It can also be used with the leading email clients, including Outlook.
Here’s the video of their pitch from last Fall’s DEMO competition.

Businesses can reduce server and file distribution costs with Scayl, while also beefing up their email security. For enterprise the benefits really kick in when a company is regularly sharing large files to many people. It appears that Scayl will be charging a modest annual fee per email account, with no charge for individual file shares.
Scayl facilitates delivery on a broad range of connected devices from PCs and Macs to tablets, set top boxes, HD TVs, and media servers. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Scayl is an ambitious outfit. By transforming email – the most familiar of online communication utilities – into something more useful, their efforts are likely to breathe additional life into what remains one of the most ubiquitous means of sharing content digitally.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: ThinkNear Helps Brick and Mortars Drive Business During Slow Sales Periods 0

One of the biggest challenges facing a local brick and mortar business is managing staffing levels for the amount of customer flow you are probably going to get during different time periods.
  • For example, given that employees don’t want one or two hour shifts but that many businesses have heavy sales periods during the day that last one to two hours, there’s a fundamental resource problem.
  • Another example: say you operate a restaurant in Daytona Beach. Business may be strong during the “Season” in Florida when the Snowbirds come south, But come April or May you can probably hear crickets in the kitchen. While you COULD let your employees go every year, we all know that when you find a great worker you want to hold on to them.
Do you staff for the slow periods, and risk losing customers from poor service during rushes? Or do you staff for the rush and then have staff standing around doing nothing but collecting wages? Or do you staff somewhere in between and try to balance it all as best you can?
And one friendly reminder before I get on with this review: rent and electricity don’t cost any less during slow times, so anything that can help drum up business during those periods can be a godsend.
 is a location-based promotions service for local businesses that aims to eliminate this problem by enabling store owners to drive up sales during slow periods with limited time offers delivered to smart phones within a certain radius of a location.
OK, so say you own a Subway. Your team is busy 11:30-1:30, but then has little to do from 1:30-4:00 when people begin coming in for take-out dinner sandwiches. Instead of accepting your slow time as a given, you instead work with ThinkNear to offer a $1 off coupon to individuals in the immediate vicinity, valid only during the slow period. You drive up incremental sales, ensure that your people are fully utilized, and dramatically increase the total revenue for your business.
This sizzle vid explains both the issue facing these small and larger businesses, and how their service can help turn it into an opportunity:
 
As some of you may know, I am on a bit of a crusade to point out to people that we are turning the web into a gigantic coupon ATM – and that this is not good for the future of our brands. If I hear of one more start-up working on a way to give away more of the margin, I am going to scream. But ThinkNear is different in my view. The service is clearly delivering business that would not otherwise go to a retailer, and while discounting is involved, the degree of savings is a bit more reasonable than Groupon et al.
Further, ThinkNear is something for national brick and mortar entities to consider as well. If you are Chili’s, having some incremental business around 2:00-5:00 would probably be welcome at virtually any location nationwide.
It’s an interesting service – of a type I think we are going to be hearing a lot about in the months and years to come.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: CPG Product Discovery Comes of Age With Consmr 0

These days, when I want to try a new restaurant in the Bay Area, I head over to Yelp to see what others have said about it. When I want to find new books to read, I visit LibraryThing. These platforms are really rather powerful ways to get some perspective on a new business or item.
Not perfect, o’course – there are certainly instances in which bad actors have tried to manipulate the scores.
And there are certainly times when the crowds are decidedly unwise. Witness the fact that at the moment I am writing this, Snooki’s A Shore Thing is rated slightly higher than Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. No matter. These sites can provide AN INVALUABLE INPUT into your decision making process.
One world that hadn’t really been touched by the whole reviews and ratings thing was CPG. Until now.  has debuted, billing itself as a fun and easy way to share your opinion about consumer products.
Now, many people think of CPG purchase decisions as fairly low involvement or routinized. I agree that some are, but then again some aren’t. I’ll wager that there are millions of people who get a little pulse race when they see a package of Oreos, or have a strong belief in and loyalty for Tide.
Tide is, after all, a miracle product.
But I digress. Given that CPG touches the lives of virtually every person on the planet, it’s logical to expect that millions of people will care enough about a need or category to read before they buy and review after they try.
The current economic situation exacerbates this tendency. More and more people have to think about how they spend every dollar – buying the wrong $4 cereal is damned important when it’s what you have for the kids to eat all week.
So in my view the opportunity is there. For cult products like Nutella as well asworkaday allies like Swiffer. Consmr.com makes the experience of reviewing, rating, and reading about the most seemingly mundane things engaging and addictive. I’d liken it to when you read 11 pages in Consumer Reports about bar soap testing. Or a long post on Consumerist about someone’s dreadful experience at a big box retailer.
Naturally you won’t read through the pages for every product category, but it’s sort of empowering to know that there are other people who share your interest in a simple, everyday product or activity.
Consmr.com offers a variety of ways for brands and companies to partner with them. The site offers ways to engage site visitors in social media campaigns, to create brand activation programs that leverage and expand your audience of brand advocates, contests to drive message virality, and the like. I’ve spoken with one of their charter clients who attested to their flexibility combined with their vigilance to empower consumers and be 100% transparent.
Bloggers and other opinion leaders are also being signed to be category experts for the site. While it may seem a bit odd to think that there is a peanut butter expert out there, I for one have no doubt that there is. Actually, there are probably 43 of them. Which is one of the wonderful things about connected, democratic media. And another reason why I think there’s real business opportunity in Consmr. For them, and for CPG brands.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: SimplyCast is the PaaS Solution for Multi-Channel Marketing 0

Now here’s something you don’t see every day. A start-up based in Nova Scotia that has attracted attention and customers from around the world.
That company is , and what they offer is a Platform-as-a-Service solution for multichannel marketing management. So what is that in English? It’s a single system for managing, monitoring, and analyzing consumer communication efforts across multiple points of contact.
With SimplyCast, you can create, deploy, and analyze communications in the following formats:
  • Emails
  • Surveys
  • Faxes
  • Autoresponder Messages
  • SMS
  • Link Tracking
  • More
To make it easier to create marketing communications, SimplyCast uses a wizards-based toolset that enables the user to drag and drop elements into their messages and forms. Very WYSIWYG, which makes it easy to use the platform even if you are a bit of a web novice. Additionally, SimplyCast offers more than 1000 templates to get you started  – many companies find that editable templates make all communications look more professional.
For message deployment, the platform enables you to manage and segment lists, and their expertise in email coupled with close ISP relationships ensures a high delivery rate. The platform also integrates with SalesForce, Drupal, and other legacy systems prospects and clients may already be using.
Further, SimplyCast offers a solid set of real-time metrics through which to monitor, evaluate, and report results of efforts. While I have only seen demos of the offering, and have not actually used it myself, it appears that their web based reports are easy to use. Additionally, the platform offers simple export and download features for those looking to develop Excel, PowerPoint, and other types of reporting documents and presentations.
A platform like this is best suited for small to medium sized businesses, and they offer a variety of pricing plans to cover the waterfront in terms of offerings. You can:
  • Use it for Free: SimplyCast allows users with less than 1000 contacts per month to use its platform for free to deliver an unlimited number of communications.
  • Credit Based Pricing: You can pay by the delivered message with pricing beginning at $5. In this plan you bank a number of credits and use them on an as needed basis depending upon your contacts schedule.
  • Contact Based Pricing: Those sending lots of messages to the same list can purchase plans based upon the number of contacts or records rather than the number of delivered messages. Pricing begins at $13.
  • PAYG: In this plan your credits do not expire, so it is set up for infrequent mailers.
What I find most significant about this platform is the idea that it is enabling small to medium sized businesses to take a much more holistic view of contacting consumers. It often takes too long for technology to filter through all business levels. The flexibility in enabling multiple contact points makes it easy for companies to truly reflect consumer preferences in their contact plans. And to adjust those plans as consumer preferences change.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer
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